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ENGLISH 161:Narrative and Narrative Theory (COMPLIT 161E)

An introduction to stories and storytelling--that is, to narrative. What is narrative? When is narrative fictional and when non-fictional? How is it done, word by word, sentence by sentence? Must it be in prose? Can it be in pictures? How has storytelling changed over time? Focus on various forms, genres, structures, and characteristics of narrative.

ENGLISH 163D:Shakespeare: The Ethical Challenge (TAPS 163D)

Was the eighteenth century right in proclaiming Shakespeare to be the greatest moral philosopher? What are the ethical challenges Shakespeare's major plays still pose for us? Can we divorce ethical decisions from the contingencies of experience? We will ask a series of normative ethical questions (to do with pleasure, power, old age, self-sacrifice, and truth telling) and attempt to answer them in relation to the dramatic situation of Shakespeare's characters on the one hand and our own cultural situation on the other. The ethical challenge of Shakespearean drama will be set against selected readings in ethical theory.

ENGLISH 165:Perspectives on American Identity (AMSTUD 160)

Required for American Studies majors. In this seminar we trace diverse and changing interpretations of American identity by exploring autobiographical, literary, and/or visual texts from the 18th through the 20th century in conversation with sociological, political, and historical accounts. *Fulfills Writing In the Major Requirement for American Studies Majors*

ENGLISH 167H:The Ethical Gangster

(English majors must register for 5 units) A study of recent developments in understanding human moral psychology using mafia movies to explore the differences between Kantian and Utilitarian moral theory. We will study the greatest hits of gangster fiction and film, from Fielding's
Jonathan Wild to
The Sopranos.

ENGLISH 180B:Reading Politics: The History and Future of Literacy

Reading is a political act. Through our major texts of Charles Dickens's
Oliver Twist, Zora Neale Hurston¿s
The Eatonville Anthology, and Azar Nafisi¿s
Reading Lolita in Tehran, we will explore the classed, racialized, and gendered power dynamics of literacy and literature. How can books incite social revolutions? How can they maintain harmful inequalities? When is reading a tool of empowerment and when is it a tool of social control? We will examine these questions in a number of contexts, ranging from Victorian London, to the Jim Crow American South, from the Islamic revolution in Iran to a Silicon Valley proliferating with new forms of scientific, technological, and financial literacy. The course includes a significant service learning component, in which students will volunteer to tutor underprivileged readers through Bay Area literacy programs. Final projects will ask students to reflect on these tutoring experiences and consider the complex politics at work in the act of teaching someone to read.

Last offered: Summer 2017
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-SI

ENGLISH 182E:Photography in Fiction

Since its invention in the early 19th century, photography has found countless documentary and artistic applications. As an art form, it is not only a medium of its own, but one which has entered into fascinating dialogue with other media, from film to dance. Perhaps nowhere has photography been put to such intriguing multimedia use as in fiction. Since the early 20thcentury, authors as diverse as Virginia Woolf, German novelist W.G. Sebald, and the contemporary Sri-Lankan-Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje, have deployed photographs throughout their texts. In this course, we will look at this literary tradition, exploring the way that text and image enter into a complex dance, at times enhancing narrative, at times troubling it. What can we make of these strange and wonderful hybrids? What place do images have in traditional narratives? What are the ethics of such work in an age in which the technological distinction between truth and fiction is becoming ever more blurred? As we read (and look), we will find ourselves not only drawn into the narratives themselves, but sent beyond them, into questions of history, gender, trauma, and memory.

ENGLISH 183E:Self-Impersonation: Fiction, Autobiography, Memoir

Course will examine the intersecting genres of fiction, autobiography, and memoir. Topics will include the literary construction of selfhood and its constituent categories (gender, race, ethnicity, religion, etc.); the role of language in the development of the self; the relational nature of the self (vis-à-vis the family, "society," God); the cultural status of "individuality"; the concept of childhood; and the role of individual testimony in our understanding of family, religious and national history. In addition to short theoretical works, authors will include Knausgaard, Nabokov, Hoffman, Winterson, Said, Levi, Barthes, and Duras.

Last offered: Autumn 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum

ENGLISH 184E:Literary Text Mining

This course will train students in applied methods for computationally analyzing texts for humanities research. The skills students will gain will include basic programming for textual analysis, applied statistical evaluation of results and the ability to present these results within a formal research paper or presentation. Students in the course will also learn the prerequisite steps of such an analysis including corpus selection and cleaning, metadata collection, and selecting and creating an appropriate visualization for the results.

ENGLISH 195B:How to Write a Great Essay: A Writing Bootcamp for Undergraduates

The course will be a practical workshop for undergraduates on how to improve essay-writing skills. we will focus on the finer points of vocabulary, grammar, mechanics, logic, timing, intellectual precision; how to connect with (and delight) an audience; how to magnify a theme; how to deflect counter-arguments; how to develop your own sophisticated authorial 'style'; how to write sentences (and papers!) your reader will care about and admire and maybe even remember.

Last offered: Winter 2018
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-CE

ENGLISH 201:The Bible and Literature

Differences in translations of the Bible into English. Recognizing and interpreting biblical allusion in texts from the medieval to modern periods. Readings from the Bible and from British, Canadian, American, and African American, and African literature in English.